8.11.09

Meera Syal -Series of Asian women writers.

Meera Syal was born in the Midlands and was brought up in a mining village in the early sixties. Her parents had recently arrived in England from India.Meera Syal's father was Hindu and her mother was Sikh.Her fringe show One of Us won an award at the Edinburgh Festival. Since then Meera Syal has been a success in both writing and acting. An early success was the sketch show, Goodness Gracious Me. Meera Syal also wrote and played the granny in the BBC comedy series The Kumars at No 42.2009 saw Syal cast in Holby City and in the film Mad, Sad and Bad.Meera Syal's book, Anita and Me, was short-listed for various awards and was made into a film for which she wrote the screenplay.Her diverse skills were confirmed when she wrote the musical Bombay Dreams, produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber.Meera was awarded an MBE in 1997 and won the Media Personality of the Year award at the Commission for Racial Equality's annual Race in the Media awards (2000), as well as the EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Media Personality of the Year in 2001.Through her success as an actor and writer, Meera Syal has joined the list of Britain's richest Asians, with an estimated fortune of £4m. She feels her creative forces owe much to the dual identity she has embraced.Meera Syal is the woman behind some of the UK's biggest hits, hits that have put Asian faces on our screens and stages.